This Sunday Chibots (my other robotics club) met and two representatives from the Chicago Robotic Combat Association (http://www.thecrca.corg) group were present. The CRCA was founded by Brian Schwartz and Dave Miller in 2005, Brian was at our meeting. I told Brian about our new MVCC Robotics club and our plan to put together a Battle Bot for competition. Here is what he told me:

While competition combat robotics is extremely fun, it is also a lot of work and somewhat dangerous to wit:

Due to the high stress on components everything must be CAD designed

Said design must incorporate stress calculations to avoid parts shearing

Said design must be complete, adding components as an afterthought without proper mounting is unsafe (i.e. disallowed by the judges) and prone to failure

Said design requires a fairly long time to create and verify (well worth it in the end ;-)

All dangerous components (high current leads, sharp blades, rotating weights, etc.) have rigid safety standards that must be followed. No robot is allowed to compete if it does not meet these standards.

Most combat robots cost from $1000 to $20,0000, the median being somewhere between $2000 and $3000 for hobbyists.

Brian would be happy to meet with our group and mentor us to get us going. All he requires is that we do some ground work and have the dedication to see this through as it is a lengthy and time consuming task.

There is usually only one driver though sometimes two are used with one driving and one operating the weapons so some participants need to be prepared to be "pit crew" during an event.

All that being said, it sounded like combat robotics is pretty fun. I am not trying to discourage anyone by the above statements, but do want to make sure everyone involved is aware of the months of effort on required as Brian repeated this several times. The fruits of these labor does not show up until toward the end. If you are like myself and prefer a more immediate gratification then combat robotics is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you are the type of dedicated individual to do this sort of task, then this is right up your alley and would be immmensely enjoyable.

I might add that we can do combat robotics within our club and possibly in conjunction with other clubs on a smaller scale to minimize all this up front effort. This type of combat is usually referred to as "Critter Crunch" or "Ant Weight" combat. Critter Crunch is much simpler as the combatants are usually made from modified retail systems (think remote control cars ;-) and controlled via a cabling system. Costs are fairly low so individuals as well as small teams can participate with everyone getting a chance to drive.

Ant Weight on the other hand requires a small area be built and is more like miniature Battle Bots. As long as we don't get involved with any of the professional groups (they tend to use exotic metals to keep weights down) this is also doable.